JavaScript

A lot of people ask about drag and drop, and here is a nice set of examples: Direct Manipulation Using JavaScript and CSS. Direct manipulation, particularly drag and drop, is under utilized in desktop applications and is almost non-existant in web applications. The following examples demonstrate that direct manipulation is possible in modern browsers. Each Read the rest…

GreaseMonkey is a very popular plugin for Mozilla, and now Todd has released a very early version of GreaseMonkIE. Although some may poo-poo IE, we can’t forget its market-share, and from what I hear IE 7 is going to be pretty darn cool. So, hopefully the monkIE will catch up to the monkey, and user Read the rest…

ActiveWidgets has released an updated Grid component: ActiveWidgets Grid 1.0. The grid component is very clean and slick, and is only one of the many components in their UI toolkit. ActiveWidgets products are available for both open source and commercial software development. Here are the simple guidelines for choosing the right licensing option: Use the Read the rest…

TrimPath has a new TrimQuery release which groks SQL: With some inspiration from the JavaScript DB project, Iâ€™ve finally added a SQL parsing frontend to TrimQuery, release 1.0.28. That is, the TrimQuery engine now supports SQL instead of just the TrimQuery Language (TQL). You can take a look at the new demo page for a Read the rest…

Michael Moncur has spoken about the concerns wrt security with GreaseMonkey. I understand that people get concerned when they think of scripts running wild on their system. However, like Michael, I also find it ironic that many of the same people are 100% ok with installing firefox extensions, or grabbing the latest Cool Toy from Read the rest…

Do you want to go annotation crazy in the JavaScript world? Anders NorÃ¥s has created annotation support in JavaScript. He follows the XDoclet-style approach, in that annotations are tacked on via comments: Calculator.square=function(num) { /** *@Version(â€œ1.0.0â€?) *@Modifiers(modifiers=Modifier.static|Modifier.public) *@Returns(type=â€?numberâ€?,description=â€?The square of the given numberâ€?) */ return num*num; } and then you can get at the annotation Read the rest…

One of the common arguments is whether or not your application “should just work” if the client doesn’t have JavaScript enabled (or an old version etc). Jep Castelein spoke about this recently. As always, when you are chosing technology you have decisions to make. One of them is the balance. How much time are you Read the rest…

Having a lot of different implementations and innovations is certainly a good thing. However, many Java web developers are frustrated as hundreds or thousands have sprung up over time. As soon as Servlets and JSPs were released, people realised that they wanted to build a framework at a higher level of abstraction. This lead to Read the rest…

Lloyd Dalton has a nice little site colr.org, which lets you mess with colors in a del.icio.us kinda way. colr.org has two purposes: It’s a tool to let people fiddle around with colors and words. It’s a jungle gym (of sorts) for software ideas

Mike passed on a link to JavaScript O Lait: It’s more than just a JavaScript library. The goal is to ease JavaScript development by building a library of reusable modules and components and enhancing JavaScript with simpler Class and Module handling mechanisms. “JavaScript O Lait” is free and is covered by the LGPL. There are Read the rest…

A lot of developers ‘poo poo’ any code that is written in JavaScript. “JavaScript isn’t a real programming language” “JavaScript is just about browser hacker scripts” “You can use it to focus(). Big deal.” “JavaScript is for the HTML designers, not for REAL coders” Giving thought to your JavaScript code As such, any JavaScript code Read the rest…

James Britt has written an article titled Getting started with Orbjson (PDF). Orbjson is a JSON-RPC object request broker for JavaScript/Ruby RPC interaction. Communication between client and server is done using JSON, the JavaScript object notation Orbjson takes JSON-RPC requests, locates the correpsonding server-side object, deserializes the requrst, and invokes the method call. Orbjson then Read the rest…